Chapter 2 - Continuity

‘Of course!’ he mumbled and got up from the leather couch he’d been sleeping on, stretching a little to straighten his sore back. “What is this place?” he looked around, somewhat relieved to find himself in a familiar setting. 

The light levels in the room were low enough that the spotlights under the glass shelves picked up on the luminescent quality of the liquors inside the odd bottles and made them sparkle with their own inner glow, like they were part of the ambient lighting themselves.

He noticed, to his bewilderment, that his stomach was rumbling; he was starving like he hadn’t eaten in days.

‘I wonder if they keep any food around here,’ he started rummaging through the refrigerators underneath the bar in search of plunder. He emerged victorious from his quest through barkeep underworld, a sandwich in one hand and a plate in the other. He arranged a place setting for himself on the other side of the counter and went back for the beer. 

‘This is not so bad, actually,’ he thought, reasonably satisfied as he threw the last bite of the sandwich in his mouth and washed it down with what was left of the bottle.

He got up to get himself another cold one and his good mood turned suddenly sullen: the lights in the room had started to dim. He sighed, annoyed, grabbed a candy bar for the road and approached the wall to pick a pattern.

Which pattern to choose? Would it make a difference, one versus another? After all, he did not know what the patterns meant anyway, or whether there was a hierarchy to them, some kind of order that helped one make sense of the collection as a whole, rather than as a mismatched kit of parts. 

He tried to make connections between the flourishes and the geometric designs, a wasted effort really, like trying to find the sharp edges of a rushing stream. He shrugged, thinking ‘what’s the point’, and picked a pattern at random.

The dark passage beaconed from behind the open panel, but it wasn’t like the last one, a pitch black hole, it was a shallow space, like the inside of a double wall, whose back was close enough to touch if he stretched out his hand. On this back wall, conveniently placed on a shelf right in front of his face, there was a flashlight. It was lit.

‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ he hesitated, trying to figure out from the air movements if this shallow interstitial space had another opening somewhere along the way.

He frowned on the verge of deciding to let the door snap back shut, mark the pattern as unusable and try his luck with a better one, but curiosity got the better of him and he stepped in, almost against his will, to the sound of the panel closing behind him. 

He immediately regretted his decision, but the panel was now shut and he couldn’t see or feel any traces of the opening, so he sighed, grabbed the flashlight, and started walking along the wall. 

The interstitial space was unfinished and the gaps between the studs were filled with dust and cobwebs, and electrical wires that gathered in thick bunches here and there and hung in lazy catenary curves along the girts. 

Wherever the roof deck was, it was too high to see in the dim glow of the flashlight, and every ten feet or so the thick bunches of cables took a turn upwards, clambered the double studs like ivy and disappeared into the darkness above.

He had been walking through the narrow space for he didn’t even know how long, having to turn sideways from time to time to clear stack vents and vertical mains, when he noticed that the horizontal framing was morphing, stretching deeper and deeper and turning to shelves and grates on which he could see odd objects, covered with dust - a little tin of mouse-be-gone, a stack of shelf braces, an empty water bottle. 

The more he advanced, the fuller the shelves became, and they were spaced a foot apart now; with the narrow walkway widening to a comfortable four feet, the interstitial space started taking the appearance of a library back room. 

The weird storage space filled with stacks of books, all protected in archival cellophane bags and bound all the same, without titles or differentiating features, ended abruptly in front of a large fire door, as wide as the corridor. 

One could see the space beyond it through the wire glass lite: a huge reading room wrapped in heavy wood cabinetry and whose gently domed ceiling was adorned with frescoes. 

Even though the space was barely visible in the soft gleam of the emergency lights, he recognized it immediately.

‘What on earth am I doing here?’ he thought as he tried the door, just to cover his bases. As expected, it was locked. 

He turned around to find his way back and gazed, bewildered, at a square room large enough not to feel claustrophobic and surrounded by shelves. There was no corridor.

‘Well,’ he thought, ‘I guess I’ll just have to make myself comfortable and wait for the place to open.’ Somebody was bound to be in that large public reading room during library hours and they were sure to hear him pound on the door. While he tried to compose a plausible explanation for how he ended up locked in an archive room during off hours a trickle of thought, cold as liquid nitrogen, made its way through his mind and spilled into his whole nervous system, making his hands tingle and his chin go numb: he had been in that public reading area so many times he lost count and he was absolutely sure he had never noticed a wide metal door in it. There was no doubt in his mind about that. He tried to comfort himself with the fact that maybe the public side of the door had been cosmetically altered to match the decor, a thought he dismissed because it made no sense. All the staff doors he remembered seeing in that room were barely two-and-a-half foot wide at most.

In a panic, he jumped and started jiggling the handle in an irrational attempt that actually panned out: the door opened with no effort. He looked at the other side of it, while still standing in the doorway, and he wasn’t even surprised to confirm that it was indeed one of the narrow staff doors leading to the restricted section. A golden cursive marked the door JC. He looked inside again and found it transformed into a closet barely two by three, with an old mop sink in one corner and cleaning supplies stacked neatly in the other. An ironic grin upturned the corners of his lips.

“The broom closet? Really?”

The problem with understanding reality is not that we can’t see it for what it is, it’s that we do see it, but explain it away because the findings don’t jibe with our mental model of what it is supposed to be. 

“Excuse me, sir?” a voice sounded from behind. He turned around to see a woman whose face betrayed internal conflict; she was still assessing whether she should be nice to the lost library patron or stern towards the perpetrator who was trying to breach into a restricted area. “What are you doing? Those doors are for staff only.” 

He smiled his most charming smile, but didn’t have time to concoct an answer before the lady became belligerent.

“And how did you get in here? The library opened only two minutes ago!”

He fretted in search of an answer while she stopped him with a decisive hand gesture.

“Stay right here, please! I’m going to call my manager.” 

“What is this about?” a distinguished older gentleman in a three-piece suit approached the two.

“This person was trying to gain access to a non-public area,” the lady explained.

“I wasn’t, actually,” he played for time. “I have misplaced my glasses. Oh, there they are,” he smiled and pointed cheerfully at a pair that was sitting on top of the partition between the printers. “Long night, you know?” He smiled apologetically, grabbed the glasses and placed them on his nose, struggling to fit their narrow frame around his face.

They were too small.

The older librarian frowned in disapproval at the disheveled appearance of the man before him. His clothes were dusty, like he’d been sleeping on the floor, and one could see pieces of cobwebs hanging from one of his sleeves. He shook his head in dismay and left without a word, thinking how much the mores of polite society had declined for a patron to show up to request materials from the reference desk nursing a hangover at eight in the morning. His stride broadened as he approached his office, which he entered, relieved, and locked behind him. His morning research time, respected by all.

‘What am I to do now?’ the lost wanderer looked around, found himself unrestricted and used the lucky opportunity to leave. 

He could hear the woman librarian call out from behind as he negotiated his way down the monumental marble stairs amid the sea of people walking up and down it. 

“Hey! Those are my glasses! Stop him! Stop him immediately! Security!” He abandoned the glasses on the flat cap of a stair post and got lost in the crowd to make his way out into the park. ‘Who am I?’ he groaned, anguished. ‘Who am I? Why do I know this place? How am I ever going to get back home when I don’t know where that is?’

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the candy bar and a bunch of dollar bills, all crumpled up and slightly humid. The morning air was humid too and a cutting wind reached him to the bone as if to punish him for walking outside without a coat so early in spring. Biting into the candy, he smiled at the dollar bills, swerved left abruptly and headed towards a tiny coffee shop in the basement of the building across the street. It took his eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dark after he’d been out in the bright light of the morning, and only realized where he was when he heard the soft muzak tones, after the door had already closed shut behind him.